Party Line or Bottom Line? Decision-Making in Local Contexts

Abstract

Does partisanship reduce the importance of self-interest in local political decision-making? I examined the case of homeowners and their preferences for lower property taxes, as well as their evaluations of zoning and development policy, to answer this question. Relying on data from a conjoint survey experiment ( n = 2036), I found that homeowners were more likely to select a candidate who supported lower property taxes than non-homeowners, on average. However, homeowners did not express stronger preferences for lower property taxes when evaluating candidates from the opposing party, or making decisions in elections that featured two-party competition. I supplemented my experimental data with survey data from the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), which asked respondents to evaluate zoning and development in their area, as well as their mayor. I found that homeowners were more likely than non-homeowners to credit their mayor for favorable evaluations of zoning and development regardless of their mayor’s partisanship.